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In the Beginning

Meet the Family

My father, Alfred Cope, was from Winnipeg and left home at fifteen to work in the northern mines of Churchill. He had only completed grade six, but when joking about his education, he would say that he had done half of grade twelve. When meeting people who were from Manitoba, he would bait them with: “There is only one good road in Winnipeg. That’s the road heading out of town.” His father, Albert Cope, was a wounded veteran of the First World War, and his uncle Llewellyn had been killed near Elverdinghe Chateau in Flanders on August 24, 1917.

After working in the mines, Dad rode the rails to the West Coast, where he took a job as a sawyer at the Hammond Mill in Pitt Meadows. His nickname was “Cash” because he always carried a large wad of bills to negotiate any spontaneous deal that came his way. Never one for maintaining his property, whenever something broke or needed replacing, he would comment, “Oh, well, it’s only money, and I got lots.”

My mother, Margaret Sweet, was born in Vernon, BC. Her father was a mill worker and her mother stayed at home to care for her brothers and sisters. Margaret had moved to New Westminster to enter nursing school at Essondale Hospital when she met Dad at a dance at the Harris Road Community Hall in 1952. They were married a short time later. They had four children, two boys and two girls. The girls became nurses; the boys became policemen.

An update on the police side of the author’s family so far includes, wife: senior director, Vancouver Police Department; brother: inspector, VPD; father-in-law: chief constable-retired, VPD; brother-in-law: sergeant, VPD; nephew: constable, VPD; another nephew: Vancouver civilian peace officer in the VPD Information Management Section; niece’s husband: constable, VPD; cousin and black sheep of the family: staff sergeant, Canadian Pacific Railway Police. Recently, at a very large family gathering, I commented to another brother-in-law, who owns a construction company, “Did you know that you are the only person in this room who doesn’t work for the government?” He responded, “I just took a contract from the Burnaby School Board.”

I Blame Television

I was born in Saint Mary’s Hospital in New Westminster and raised in Vancouver’s “Little Italy” on Commercial Drive, which in those days was a thriving working-class neighbourhood populated by new European immigrants. However, we lived across the street from Clark Park, which was the local gathering place for thieves and hoods known as “Clark Parkers,” many of whom graduated to become outlaw motorcycle-gang members. In later years I learned that the Vancouver Police Department solved the Clark Park problem by creating the “H” or Heavy Squad. Dressed in dark plainclothes with signature fedora hats, the members of the squad would sweep through the park several times in the course of an evening, using baseball bats to encourage the thugs to leave the area. When the problem was miraculously solved, an elderly female resident living across from the park commented to reporters, “It seems as though an older gang has taken over the park, and they are so much more polite than the other group.”

My friends were Joe Barsilli, Billy Turkanoff and Victor the Knife. I don’t remember what Victor’s last name was, but he earned his unfortunate sobriquet on our first day of kindergarten when a discussion with the teacher about whether or not he would participate in nap time deteriorated into an ugly incident. He wasn’t there for the second day of kindergarten. Joe and Billy were relatively tame. I remember sitting in the lunchroom at Grandview Elementary School enjoying my daily Wonder Bread sandwich with peanut butter and jam that I had just taken out of my Roy Rogers lunch kit. Watching the other kids chewing on home-made filone, pane Siciliano or ciabatta heaped with provolone and prosciutto, I thought, Boy, eating that rotten-smelling stuff … they must be poor.

Television was black and white with no cable or remote control, but we watched Bonanza every Sunday, and Gunsmoke, Have Gun—Will Travel (and no, Alex Trebek, the first name of Paladin was not “Wire,” even though his card said, “Wire Paladin, San Francisco”—the reference meant “Telegraph Paladin in San Francisco”), Dragnet and Sea Hunt during the week.

One of our favourite pastimes was running through the neighbourhood playing “cops and robbers.” Mom alleges that when I was on my way out to play, she would always caution me to “play the cop, not the robber.” I don’t recall this, but I have no evidence to the contrary. One day in 1962, when I was in grade two, our teacher, Mrs. Brandon, had the children come up to the front of the class one by one and tell everybody what they wanted to do when they grew up. I was seven years old when I stood before the class and proudly proclaimed that I wanted to scuba dive and be a policeman. My mother claims credit for my career; I blame James Arness and Richard Boone.

President Lupo

In 1973, after graduating from Gladstone Secondary School, I enrolled in the Criminal Justice Program at Langara College in Vancouver. The instructor was Ian Bruce Campbell, and I really enjoyed the classes he taught. He had been a bobby in Great Britain and then served with the British military to put down the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya before immigrating to Canada, where he joined a small municipal police department back east. My classmates and I enjoyed diverting him from the mundane curriculum so that he would recount the more interesting experiences of his past. He once told us of the time he and his squad were out in the jungle on an anti-rebel patrol when they were ambushed. One of his friends on the patrol, badly burned in the firefight, asked his troop mates to kill him, as he could not deal with the pain and disfigurement. They carried the soldier to base hospital, where he was treated and survived. Several times since then that injured soldier thanked Campbell for not complying with his request. Campbell said that this was one of the most difficult decisions he ever made.

While studying Criminology at VCC Langara, my class created this jacket crest.

After he came to Canada, the town where Campbell served as a police constable was suffering thefts from parking meters. It was a particularly embarrassing crime because the location of the thefts was so public. Campbell staked out a likely row of parking meters near the town square in the early hours of the morning, then hid to await the thieves’ arrival. When he saw two shadowy figures emptying the coin meters, he moved in and discovered that the petty crooks were, in fact, fellow police officers from his own department. He told our class that he was surprised at the way some of his co-workers treated him as a result of arresting these two thieves. He still advocated doing the right thing, but he advised us that “whistle blowers” should have a thick skin. The arrest of his two co-workers likely precipitated his move to the West Coast. Ian Campbell made a great contribution to public safety, training hundreds of students who would go on to serve with distinction as peace officers throughout the province.

Other than Campbell’s classes, I found academia boring and spent a lot of my time at Langara supplementing my lifeguard’s income (I had been a lifeguard at various pools and beaches in the city since I was fifteen) by playing blackjack in the cafeteria. I was also attracted to student politics, and in the spring semester of 1974 I was elected vice-president of the student union. When the president stepped down later in the year, I took over as head of the council. Some years later, when I was serving in the Vancouver Police Department’s Traffic Division, a group of us were having breakfast in a restaurant on Denman Street when I was approached by Betsy Dennison, a fellow former student representative. We had a few words, and when she left the table, the guys asked, “Where do you know her from?” I told them that we had been on student council together, and when I became president, she had taken over the office of vice-president. And that was it. From that moment on I was “the Pres.” It was written on my locker and DynaTaped to the back of my motorcycle helmet.

In policing, many people have nicknames, and you hope and pray that if you acquire one, it won’t be too humiliating. I got away pretty lucky. Some of the good and bad ones included: Spanky, Frank, McStabb, McSnapper, the Poisoned Dwarf, Renatta the She-Wolf of the SS, the Outlaw, the Commander, Skipper, Tripod, the Peeper, Dog-balls, Big Yellow Bird, RAM, Cathy Alphabet, the Schnozz, the Horseman, the Purple Onion, the Poodle and Electra. One of the constables acquired an unfortunate nickname that followed him throughout his career. On one dark and stormy night, four of us were wearing our yellow rain slickers as we worked a roadblock in the West End, when Constable Jim Davidson arrested a driver for being impaired. As the other three of us huddled together watching the formalities, Jim dealt with the driver, who refused to take a breathalyzer test. One requirement of Canadian law is that to make a legal arrest, a constable must formally identify himself, touch the offender and tell him or her the true reason for the arrest. Davidson touched the drunk and said, “You understand that I am a police officer?” The drunk responded, “A police officer … a police officer? You don’t look like no police officer. You look like a duck.” And that’s how the legend of “the Duck” was born.

My own nickname didn’t change until years later, when I was a patrol sergeant and my crew decided that I reminded them of “Lupo”—not the lone, silent predator, skirting the shadows, waiting to lash out at criminal prey, but a psychopathic, meat-cleaver-swinging butcher that a local illustrator was trying to make into a notorious cartoon figure. I still have the T-shirt. The name stuck even after I left the Patrol Division, but fortunately, very few remembered that the full nickname was “Lupo the Butcher.”

Late in 1973, while I was attending Langara College, I passed the exam for the Vancouver Police Department’s Reserve Unit. When I had my interview, the inspector checked my score and advised me that there would be no reason to re-write the exam should I wish to apply for the Regular Force when I turned twenty-one, which was then the minimum age requirement.

Oakalla Prison

In the spring of 1974 I was 18 years of age, and I applied for summer work at Oakalla Prison Farm in Burnaby, BC. I asked the prison personnel officer if I could do the widest possible range of jobs rather than be assigned to one unit. As I had already been trained in the use of the Smith & Wesson Model 10 .38 calibre revolver by the Vancouver Police Department, my first assignment was to work the prison’s west wing wall. For this assignment I carried a Winchester lever-action .30-30 that I hadn’t been trained on but had seen John Wayne use several times in the movies. Later I worked the mobile patrol, the isolation unit (located under the piggery) and the west wing lock-up.

Pocket identification I was issued while working in the summer of 1974 at Oakalla Prison Farm.

One of the first pieces of advice I was given while working at Oakalla came from a grizzled old jailer. He advised, “Don’t be nice to the scrotes. When there is a riot, the friendly guards are the first ones they take hostage.” (Short for scrotum, “scrote” is a Vancouver Eastside term used to describe worthless scum.) Less than a year later, social worker Mary Steinhauser and fourteen other staffers were taken hostage by prisoners at the BC Penitentiary in New Westminster. Forty hours into the hostage taking, prison guards stormed the barricade and opened fire. Steinhauser was killed by gunfire, and one of the hostage takers was seriously wounded.

The west wing was the most dangerous place in Oakalla to work. Prisoners were held there awaiting trial, so they had no way of knowing what, if any, sentence they would be facing, and tempers flared with little warning. It was here that I met Eddy Haymour, generally considered to be one of Canada’s few truly political prisoners. In 1971, he had purchased Rattlesnake Island on Okanagan Lake near Peachand, BC, and proceeded with his plan of turning the island into an Arabian Nights–themed amusement park, to the chagrin of local and provincial politicians. But his project was torpedoed and he was later arrested for making threats, then ultimately incarcerated in Oakalla.

Haymour was by trade a barber and he held court daily, offering advice and wisdom at the prison barbershop. One day, along with seven or eight prisoners, I was being entertained by Haymour’s theories about the nature of the world when he told me, “The reason all of these men are criminals is because they are all bastards. None of them know their fathers.” He pointed to each of the prisoners in turn, and rather than be offended, each offered a brief comment that supported Haymour’s statement. In fact, none of them knew their fathers.

Haymour later sold Rattlesnake Island back to the provincial government for forty thousand dollars and was found not guilty of the charges against him. He was ultimately freed and in the fall of 1975 went home to Lebanon. A few months later he and his cousins seized the Canadian Embassy in Beirut. He negotiated his way back to Canada, where he had been assured that the federal government would assist him in processing his claim for compensation. In 1986 the BC Supreme Court ruled that the BC government had conspired against him and his theme park and awarded him $250,000 in compensation. He didn’t get his island back, but he built Castle Haymour, now Peachland Castle, on Highway 97 in Peachland, BC.

Working at Oakalla taught me three things: One, don’t be nice to the scrotes. Two, criminality generally occurs as a result of a breakdown of the family unit. Three, don’t ever work in a jail.

In 1974 the age requirement for Vancouver City Police recruits was reduced from twenty-one to nineteen, the height restriction was eliminated and the minimum education standard was raised to secondary school graduation instead of grade eleven. By this time the days of twirling a Fraternal Order of Masons ring while sitting for a job interview were long gone, and Vancouver was breaking new ground by diversifying its hiring practices. However, what really increased the multicultural nature of the force was not just the new progressive attitude about hiring people who reflected the makeup of the community; it was the elimination of the height requirement. Demanding that recruit candidates be at least six feet tall had acted as a silent barrier to employment for many Asian groups. Now recruits were only required to be physically fit and in excellent health. From that time on, whenever the department marched in parades, you no longer saw a sea of white faces.

Don Winterton, the new chief constable, was heavily promoting a program of neighbourhood policing, which meant assigning a contingent of officers to individual neighbourhood-support offices. This program, coupled with union demands that a higher percentage of police cars be manned by two officers, resulted in a hiring boom. Normally the VPD would hire about thirty members a year to cover attrition, but in 1975 more than 160 officers were hired, bringing the total number on payroll to about 850.

That September I came to Inspector Don MacGregor’s office to advise him that my birthday was on October 19, and then I would be good to go. At that time armed reserve officers accompanied regular police members who would have otherwise been in one-man police cars. At the end of shift the regular officer would submit a fitness report that would go on the reserve officer’s record of service. MacGregor said that he would consider my application in about a year, when there were more of these fitness reports on my service record for him to scrutinize. From that day on, I was out in the patrol cars three times a week. In December, with a stack of recommendations spilling from my file folder, I re-attended MacGregor’s office, hoping he had forgotten that he told me to come back in a year.

On February 20, 1975, I received a letter stating:

Dear Sir:

This is to inform you that you have been chosen a member of this force and you are instructed to report to the Police Training Academy, HMCS Discovery, Stanley Park, Vancouver, at 7:30 a.m. on March 10, 1975. Please bring your birth certificate with you.